Social Movements & Rights

All-India Women's Conference (AIWC), 1930

• Sarojini Naidu, then President of AIWC, sat in the second row.
• Lady Vidyagauri Nilkanth Bhadra was to her left.
• Margaret E. Cousins, an Irish suffragette and founder-member of AIWC, was to the extreme right.
• Cousins was one of the Vice Presidents of the organization.
• AIWC was set up in 1920.
• The movement involved itself in the freedom struggle.
• Spoke about issues like women's education and their right to vote.

Social Movements and Rights

• Workers in many industries work five or six days a week and rest on the weekends because of social movements of the past.
• These movements fought for rights like the eight-hour workday, equal pay for equal work, social security, and pensions.

Universal Adult Franchise

• Universal adult franchise, or the right of every adult to vote, is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Indian Constitution.
• Chartism was a social movement for parliamentary representation in England in the 19th Century.
• The suffragettes were activists who advocated for the right for adult women to vote.

Social Movement Features

• A social movement needs sustained collective action.
• It is often targeted toward the state and includes demanding changes in state policy or practice.
• Collective action requires some degree of organization with leadership and a structure defining member relationships and decision-making.
• Shared objectives and a general orientation toward change are essential.
• Social movements often address public issues like tribal land use rights or compensation for displaced people.
• Counter movements may arise in defense of the status quo.
• Social movements involve protest as well as mobilization activities, consensus-building, and campaigns targeting government, media, and public opinion.

Satyagraha

• Mahatma Gandhi's use of khadi during India's nationalist struggle supported Indian cotton-growers.
• The Dandi March was a protest against British taxation policies on basic commodities like salt and cloth.
• Gandhi transformed these items into symbols of resistance.

Social Change

• Social change is the accumulation of individual and collective actions over time, and is continuous.
• Social movements are directed towards specific goals.
• Social reformers in the 19th century who worked to change society should be seen as social movements.

Sociology and Social Movements

• Sociology has always had an interest in social movements.
• The French Revolution was a violent culmination of political movements.
• Concern about social order was reflected in Emile Durkheim's work, with social movements seen as forces leading to disorder.
• Karl Marx scholars believed that the 'crowd' and the 'mob' were not anarchic hooligans, but had a 'moral economy' with shared understanding of right and wrong.
• Poor people in urban areas often protested because they had no other way to express their anger and resentment against deprivation.

Types of Social Movements

• Social movements are redemptive, reformist, or revolutionary.
• Redemptive movements aim to change personal consciousness, like the Ezhava community in Kerala.
• Reformist movements seek incremental changes to existing systems, as seen in the reorganization of Indian states.
• Revolutionary movements aim to radically transform social relations, captured by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the Naxalite movement in India.
• Movements can shift over time or have a mix of redemptive, reformist, and revolutionary elements.
• Interpretation of such events in history differs between groups affected by the events.

Old and New Social Movements

• Working class movements in the capitalist west sought better wages, conditions, and social/health security from the state.
• Socialist movements were establishing new kinds of states and societies.
• Old social movements primarily sought reorganization of power relations.
• The Indian National Congress led the Indian National Movement.
• Rajni Kothari attributes the surge of social movements in India in the 1970s to people's growing dissatisfaction with parliamentary democracy.
• The old social movements was concerned about the distribution of power, while the new social movements was more concerned about quality-of-life issues

Social Movements in India

• Globalisation has reshaped people's lives.
• New binding arrangements are international.
• Environmental and health risks and nuclear warfare fears are global.
• Many new social movements are international in scope.
• New alliances like the World Social Forum raise awareness about the hazards of globalisation.
• Social movements unite participants across class boundaries, such as urban, middle-class feminists and poor peasant women in the women's movement.
• In a social movement, questions of social inequality can occur alongside other, equally important, issues.

Ecological Movements

• Modern development has focused on using natural resources.
• This unchecked use has caused new needs and exploitation of resources.
• An issue is industries displacing agriculturalists from their homes and livelihood.

Chipko Movement

• The Chipko Movement in the Himalayan foothills rallied villagers to save oak and rhododendron forests.
• Villagers hugged trees to prevent government contractors from cutting them down.
• The movement was about the livelihood of poor villagers and ecological sustainability.
• Concerns included resentment of hill villagers against a plains-based government indifferent to their concerns.
• Trees are necessary for conservation of the environment, as clean water is necessary for a healthy environment.
• The Government of India has initiated systematic efforts to bring balance, structure and quality to India's ecology through efforts like the 'Integrated Ganga Conservation Mission' and ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan'.

Class Based Movements

• Peasant movements or agrarian struggles occurred from pre-colonial days.
• Movements between 1858 and 1914 remained localised and confined to particular grievances.
• Some issues continued into the following period and became linked to the Independence movement under Mahatma Gandhi.
• The Bengal revolt (1859-62) was against the indigo plantation system.
• The 'Deccan riots' of 1857 were against moneylenders.
• Between 1920 and 1940 peasant organizations arose, for all other exploited classes.
• The first organization was the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (founded 1929) and in 1936 the All India Kisan Sabha.
• Post-independence peasant movements included the Tebhaga movement (1946–47).
• The Telangana movement (1946–51) was directed against feudal conditions in the princely state of Hyderabad.
• New farmer's movements in the 1970s were regionally organised, were non-party and were strongly anti-state and anti-urban.
• The focus demanded price and related issues.

Indian Labor

• In the early stages of colonialism, labor was cheap since the government regulated neither wages nor working conditions.
• Workers did protest, but their actions were more spontaneous.
• Though trade unions emerged later, workers did protest.
• The first trade union was established in April 1918 in Madras.
• In 1920, the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) was formed in Bombay.

The Dalit Movement

• In 1970 activists in Maharashtra protested in the name of Neo-Buddhism
• There has not been a single, unified Dalit movement but rather different movements have highlighted different issues.
• There has been is a struggle for recognition as fellow human beings and is a struggle for abolishment of stigmatisation.
• Backward Castes/classes as political entities have occurred in the colonial and post-colonial contexts.
• Caste, thus, began to lose its ritual content and become more and more secularised for political mobilisation.

Tribal Movements

• Different tribal groups spread across the country may share common issues
• Jharkhand is one of the newly formed states of India, carved out of south Bihar in the year 2000.
• Literate tribal members began to research and write about their history and myths.
• This documented and spread tribal customs and cultural knowledge.
• They used the issues against which the leaders of the tribals movement.

The Women's Movement

• As the 20th century began women's liberation groups began to form
• The AIWC began with the idea that 'women's welfare' and 'politics' were mutually exclusive.
• It is often argued that the period of activity during the independence movement did not constitute a social movement but women's contributions cannot be ignored.
• There was a renewal of the women's movement in India in the mid-1970s
• One aspect of this involved violence against women.

Explore rights gained through social movements, including universal adult franchise and worker's rights. Understand historical contexts, such as voting restrictions in pre-Independence Britain, and the significance of universal adult franchise in a democracy.